ABSTRACT
The Marshal was a paragon of the military virtues of his day. We donot just have to take the word of his biographer for that. He was tutor-in-arms to the heir of the kingdom of England for a dozen years; prized captain of three successive Angevin monarchs (see Table 3); and a (generally) successful commander in the field. These things we know from sources other than the History, so we need not doubt what it says. The Marshal was a great practitioner of what his day and age called chevalerie; but what he meant by the word and what we read into it are two different things. Several writers have had much to say about the Marshal not just as a soldier, but as an example of what they see as an early pattern of ‘chivalry’ and knight-errantry. John Gillingham has picked apart what modern historians have had to say about the Marshal’s career as a soldier, and offered his own assessment.1 He presents us with quite a different Marshal, one that I find rather more convincing than the Marshal of Sidney Painter and Georges Duby.
